Tales of Drudgery & Boredom.

Holy Shit, I Interviewed the President — MediumLegacy media isn’t mocking us because we aren’t a legitimate source of information; they’re mocking us because they’re terrified. Their legitimacy came from the fact that they have access to distribution channels and that they get to be in the White House press pool because of some long-ago established procedures that assumed they would use that power in the public interest. In reality, those things are becoming less and less important and less and less true. Distribution is free to anyone with a cell phone and the legitimacy of cable news sounds to me like an oxymoron. The median-aged CNN viewer is 60. For Fox, it’s 68.

Tough times on the road to Starcraft – Code Of HonorI’ve been writing about the early development of Warcraft, but a recent blog post I read prompted me to start scribbling furiously, and the result is this three-part, twenty-plus page article about the development of StarCraft, along with my thoughts about writing more reliable game code.

The Leaning Buildings of Santos, Brazil | Amusing PlanetThe coastline along the city of Santos, some 80 km from Sao Paulo, in Brazil, offers a strange sight. Like dominoes about to topple, the waterfront is lined by a string of high rise apartments that are unmistakably tilted to one side.

What should I do about Youtube? | Zoë KeatingMy Google Youtube rep contacted me the other day. They were nice and took time to explain everything clearly to me, but the message was firm: I have to decide. I need to sign on to the new Youtube music services agreement or I will have my Youtube channel blocked.

A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen To YouThis article points out cases where gettext (a common system for localizing software interfaces — i.e., making them work in the user's language of choice) fails because of basic differences between human languages. This article then describes Maketext, a new system capable of correctly treating these differences.

The 7 Habits of Highly Efficient Adobe Illustrator Users – Tuts+ Design & Illustration TutorialIt might initially take some time to change your settings, learn keyboard shortcuts and create actions. And there are times when you'd rather do something the old familiar way, even if it takes longer. But if you take some time up front to make your workflow more efficient, it will pay off in the long run. You'll soon see that getting rid of daily annoyances will free up your creativity and leave you with a more pleasurable Illustrator experience.

The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game DeveloperWhen I was in college they told us there would always be a demand for software developers. In general that’s still true. I always wondered what it would look like when it stopped being true, when the need for developers dwindled, and programming stopped paying the bills. Now I know.

Putting Time In Perspective – UPDATED | Wait But WhyTo try to grasp some perspective, I mapped out the history of time as a series of growing timelines—each timeline contains all the previous timelines (colors will help you see which timelines are which). All timeline lengths are exactly accurate to the amount of time they’re expressing.

Transgender People Can Explain Why Women Don’t Advance at Work | The New RepublicBecause trans people are now staying in the same careers (and sometimes the very same jobs) after they change genders, they are uniquely qualified to discuss the difference between how men and women experience the workplace. Their experience is as close to the scientific method as we can get: By isolating and manipulating gender as a variable and holding all other variables—skill, career, personality, talent—constant, these individuals reveal exactly the way one’s outward appearance of gender affects day-to-day interactions. If we truly want to understand women at work, we should listen carefully to trans men and trans women: They can tell us more about gender in the workplace than just about anyone.

Technical Documentation – Copy Protection | Dungeon Master EncyclopaediaThis document describes the copy protection scheme that was used for Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back on Atari ST and Amiga. These games used a very sophisticated copy protection. It took several months after the first release of Dungeon Master before the copy protection was correctly defeated, while most copy protections are defeated in a matter of hours or days by experimented hackers.

Is Netanyahu Finished? Maybe SoNetanyahu has stood atop the Israeli political scene for more than half a decade and that after his first term as Prime Minister starting almost twenty years ago. No single leader has so dominated Israeli politics since ben Gurion. The upcoming election in March 2015 is one he himself engineered well in advance of what was required under law, thinking that it would strengthen his hand. And yet, two weeks later, Netanyahu's position seems to deteriorate by the day.

Girls and Software | Linux JournalWhen we call a man a "technologist", we mean he's a programmer, system administrator, electrical engineer or something like that. The same used to be true when we called a woman a "technologist". However, according to the new breed, a female technologist might also be a graphic designer or someone who tweets for a living. Now, I'm glad that there are social media people out there—it means I can ignore that end of things—but putting them next to programmers makes being a "woman in tech" feel a lot like the Programmer Special Olympics.

The Shape of Rome » Ex UrbeThe new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the world’s largest archaeological park. Reactions have ranged from commuters’ groans to declarations from classicists that this single act proves the nobility of the human species.

Dan Grover | Chinese Mobile App UI TrendsOne day, for the fun of it, I started writing a list in my notebook of all the things that are different between apps here and those I’m accustomed to using and creating back in the US. When I finished, I was surprised by how long the list was, so it seemed fitting to flesh it out into a post.

Is My Startup Burn Rate Normal? | Hacker NewsIf you're not filling an efficiency gap, and you're not making money, you're not a business. You can fail one of those criteria and be either a parasite or a charity, but you need both to be a business.

What I Wish I’d Known About EmacsThe admission of emacs into the editor war is something of a misrepresentation. That emacs can be used as a text editor is incidental to its nature as a computing environment.

Typography in 8 bits: System fonts » DamienGMy love of typography originated in the 80′s with the golden years of 8-bit home computing and their 8×8 pixel mono-spaced fonts on low-resolution displays. It’s quite easy to find bitmap copies of these fonts and also scalable traced TTF versions but there’s very little discussion about the fonts themselves. Let’s remedy that by firing up some emulators and investigating the glyphs.

The Internet With A Human Face – Beyond Tellerrand 2014 Conference TalkMarc [Thiele] emailed me a few weeks ago to ask if I thought my talk would be appropriate to close the conference. "Marc," I told him, "my talk is perfect for closing the conference! The first half is this incredibly dark rant about how the Internet is alienating and inhuman, how it's turning us all into lonely monsters.” “But in the second half, I'll turn it around and present my vision of an alternative future. I'll get the audience fired up like a proper American motivational speaker. After the big finish, we'll burst out of the conference hall into the streets of Düsseldorf, hoist the black flag, and change the world.” Marc said that sounded fine.

The death of the homepage in one simple graphSo it’s an odd thing when you’ve been saying something for years and nobody believes you, then suddenly, someone publishes one leaked graph, and overnight all the world agrees with you: The homepage is dead. And still they’ve got it wrong.

Gamasutra – The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process For Creating Half-LifeWhile Half-Life has seen resounding critical and financial success (winning over 50 Game of the Year awards and selling more than a million copies worldwide), few people realize that it didn’t start out a winner — in fact, Valve’s first attempt at the game had to be scrapped. It was mediocre at best, and suffered from the typical problems that plague far too many games. This article is about the teamwork – or "Cabal process" — that turned our initial, less than impressive version of Half-Life into a groundbreaking success.

The Trade of the Century: When George Soros Broke the British PoundIn 1992, George Soros brought the Bank of England to its knees. In the process, he pocketed over a billion dollars. Making a billion dollars is by all accounts pretty cool. But demolishing the monetary system of Great Britain in a single day with an elegantly constructed bet against its currency? That’s the stuff of legends.

Metaprogramming for madmen | The ryg blogAlas, we spent an afternoon looking at different such packages, and none of them actually understood even that much about C/C++ code; they were mostly trying to make do with regular expressions. That wasn’t gonna fly for what we needed. At the end of the day (the Sunday before Easter Sunday, 2004), we hadn’t found anything useful – we had a plan, but no way to make it work. That’s when Chaos decided that, “well, guess I’ll need to write my own C++ parser then”. What, you think I was kidding with the title of this post? Note we had about 3 days total to make this work, and we were going all in by doing this; if this hadn’t worked out, we’d have been screwed.

Cuttings from a Medieval Italian Choirbook | The Public Domain ReviewJames Freeman, intern in Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts Section at The British Library, looks at cuttings from a huge 14th-century Italian choirbook and how digital technology is now helping scholars build a picture of the once intact original through virtually reuniting the “diaspora” of fragments.

Bras in Space: The Incredible True Story Behind Upcoming Film Spacesuit | The Credits.Instead, pitted against the military-industrial complex, Playtex created the 21-layer spacesuit, each layer distinct yet interrelated in function to the rest of the whole—a masterly combination of elegance, complexity, and form. Where the military contractors created cybernetic, armor-like suits (that failed, and failed again), Playtex’s vision was one of crucial softness, world class stitching, and perfect design. Traditional engineering firms could not figure out how to meet all the mission requirements and create a functioning suit that would keep the Apollo astronauts alive. The seamstresses at Playtex, with their years of experience fashioning girdles and bras, could, and did.

WarmPlace.Ru. Virtual ANS Spectral SynthesizerVirtual ANS is a software simulator of the unique Russian synthesizer ANS – photoelectronic microtonal/spectral musical instrument created by Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin from 1938 to 1958. Murzin named his invention in honour of the composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin.

Facebook buys smartphone fitness-tracking app MovesFacebook may already be tracking your usage to serve you ads, but how would you feel if it was able to log your movement? That's exactly what could be on the cards after the company confirmed it's bought Moves, the fitness-tracking app that records your daily activities using your smartphone.

10 reasons to switch to ggplot | Mandy MejiaThere are a lot of R users out there who are resistant to switching from base graphics to ggplot, and while there are some legitimate downsides and probably settings where it doesn’t make sense, for most users I believe it’s well worth the time and effort required to get started with ggplot. I mean, the New York Times thinks so! So for all those doubters (or newbies) out there, here goes my best shot at convincing you that switching to ggplot is worth the effort.

Game Programming PatternsDo you struggle to make your code hang together into a cohesive whole? Find it harder to make changes as your codebase grows? Feel like your game is a giant hairball where everything is intertwined with everything else? Wonder if and how design patterns apply to games? Hear things like “cache coherency” and “object pools”, but don’t know how to use them to make your game faster? I’m here to help! I wrote this book to answer those questions. It’s a collection of patterns I found in games to make code cleaner, easier to understand, and faster.

Hacking Sonos — MediumIn my spare time I’ve been writing an app that replaces the Sonos app used to control multiple speakers in one’s home. It’s been a little challenging so I thought I’d share how I got where I am. You can check out most of the code on Github. I’ll be pushing more stuff when it’s ready.

Why Chinese Is So Damn HardThe first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom?" A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go through the "terrible twos", it's Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years the same kids are actually using those impossibly complicated Chinese characters to scribble love notes and shopping lists. So what do I mean by "hard"? Since I know at the outset that the whole tone of this document is going to involve a lot of whining and complaining, I may as well come right out and say exactly what I mean. I mean hard for me, a native English speaker trying to learn Chinese as an adult, going through the whole process with the textbooks, the tapes, the conversation partners, etc., the whole torturous rigmarole. I mean hard for me — and, of course, for the many other Westerners who have spent years of their lives bashing their heads against the Great Wall of Chinese.

Game Mechanic ExplorerA collection of concrete examples for various game mechanics, algorithms, and effects. The examples are all implemented in JavaScript using the Phaser game framework, but the concepts and methods are general and can be adapted to any engine. Think of it as pseudocode. Each section contains several different examples that progress in sequence from a very basic implementation to a more advanced implementation. Every example is interactive and responds to keyboard or mouse input (or touch).

jdm314: The DænerydHere is my first ever hexametric composition in High Valyrian. It's only two lines, but written to sound like the beginning of a lengthy epic: Ābre se zaldrīzī bone ivāedan hen Essot jitte ēlī Pento se Dothrakoti Embraro rȳ ondoso vējo…

Stock photos that don’t suck — Design / UX — MediumFinding great stock photos is a pain. You’re left with either low-res amateur photos, people wearing cheesy headsets, or photos that are out of budget for the project you’re working on. Below is an ongoing list (so bookmark it) of the best stock photo sites I’ve come across.

Short Ribs Time and Temp – Recipe – ChefStepsCreative possibilities are especially compelling aspects of sous vide cooking. The ability to cook ingredients for prolonged periods of time at carefully controlled temperatures can yield appealing textures that are impractical, or even impossible, to achieve using conventional cooking techniques. Throughout this course we'll explore these possibilities; below is a showcase of the range of textures that you can easily achieve by sous vide cooking a tough, but flavorful cut of meat like beef short rib.

Introduction to Huginn on VimeoHuginn is a open source system for building agents that observe the world and act on your behalf. This is an introductory screencast. Your agents are standing by!

Amazon.com to Acquire comiXology | comiXology UnboundAmazon.com today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire comiXology, the company that revolutionized the digital comics reading experience with their immersive Guided View technology and makes discovering, buying, and reading comic books and graphic novels easier and more fun than ever before.

2048 Variants | Semi-long BlogHere is a list of online variants scouted from github. For the record, that means that there are very few apps on this list, and only those that you can compile yourself. The majority of these links are intended to be accessed from the Internet.

Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine for Free | Mortar Blog | Data Science at ScaleWhat’s better than a recommendation engine that’s free? A recommendation engine that is both awesome and free. Today, we’re announcing General Availability for the Mortar Recommendation Engine. Designed by Mortar’s engineers and top data science advisors, it produces personalized recommendations at scale for companies like MTV, Comedy Central, StubHub, and the Associated Press. Today, we’re giving it away for free, and it is awesome.

Introducing PredictionIO ✩ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blogPredictionIO is an open source machine learning server for software developers to create predictive features, such as personalization, recommendation and content discovery. Building a production-grade engine to predict users’ preferences and personalize content for them used to be time-consuming. Not anymore with PredictionIO’s latest v0.7 release.

Valeria Lukyanova, the Human Barbie DollI realize that just like everyone reading about Human Barbie, I had had a simple narrative prepared in my head: A small-town girl grows up obsessed with dolls, etc. Instead, I get a racist space alien.

How to Fold a Julia Fractal — Acko.netDit zou verplicht op elke school moeten getoond worden — "For every mathematical concept that we have a built-in intuition for, there are countless more we can't picture easily. That's the curse of mathematics, yet at the same time, also its charm."

HalideHalide is a new programming language designed to make it easier to write high-performance image processing code on modern machines. Its current front end is embedded in C++. Compiler targets include x86/SSE, ARM v7/NEON, CUDA, Native Client, and OpenCL.

Why Use MakeI love Make. You may think of Make as merely a tool for building large binaries or libraries (and it is, almost to a fault), but it’s much more than that. Makefiles are machine-readable documentation that make your workflow reproducible.

BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY; Doubts Raised on Number of Internet Users – New York TimesIf Mr. Quarterman's analysis is correct, then his calculations further blur the already vague notion that electronic culture and commerce is just around the corner. Certainly his assessment does much to debunk the myth of an interactive, information web that will eventually link everyone on the planet. Estimates that there are more than 20 million users of the Internet have excited the imagination of businesses, politicians, social scientists, investors and journalists.

Tour | MapboxWe make it easy to find bars on foursquare, search for hotels on Hipmunk, and organize notes in Evernote. With Mapbox, design and then publish maps that tell stories, integrate with apps, and represent brands.

Is the Oculus Rift sexist? – QuartzAlthough there was variability across the board, biological men were significantly more likely to prioritize motion parallax. Biological women relied more heavily on shape-from-shading. In other words, men are more likely to use the cues that 3D virtual reality systems relied on.

Post mortem – Thanks & lessons learned | Notes from the trenchesLessons learned – Don’t operate in a market where a single player can arbitrarily decide to kill you. Especially don’t work in a market that’s controlled by an entity that explicitly refuses to communicate with you (or anyone else) or to explain their guidelines.

The Best “Entry Level” Science Fiction Books to Convert Your FriendsA lot of the greatest science fiction and fantasy books are not for newbies. They can be daunting for new readers, because they assume you've already read a lot of science fiction and fantasy. But what are the best "entry level" science fiction and fantasy books? We asked some top editors and writers, and here are their picks.

Twitter’s Future Can Be Seen in China — IrvingsideIt will be interesting to see how Twitter creates its unique ecommerce platform, but for now we can turn to China's messaging giant WeChat to predict the San Francisco-based company's future. WeChat began as a messaging service like many of its rivals Line and WhatsApp, but has recently embraced financial transactions. WeChat's users can make payments to McDonald's through the app. After the transaction is finished, WeChat provides a QR code from McDonald's for users to redeem. Last November, WeChat partnered with Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi to sell the company's flagship phone, the Mi-3. In less than 10 minutes, 150,000 units of the device were sold on WeChat. Although WeChat's impressive user base of 500 million and counting far surpasses that of Twitter, one can still expect Twitter to experience similar results from ecommerce.